70-home village plan is back on

A new plan has been put forward for a 70-home mixed development around a Herefordshire hamlet after a similar previous proposal was rejected last year.

The Whitfield Estate also wants to create new workspace and a childcare centre, to convert a schoolhouse to residential use, while turning an existing house into a café and meeting place, on nearly seven hectares (17 acres) of land which straddles the A465 at Wormbridge.

Of the 70 new homes, 25 would be classed as affordable, the remaining 45 for open-market sale. Of varying forms and sizes and all to the northwest of the main road, they would be distributed among interlinked green spaces.

Only outline permission for these is currently being sought, meaning their details would still have to be approved separately.

Converting the adjacent, unlisted former school building, meanwhile, would “involve minimal intervention”.

Across the road, a “service courtyard square” to include the new nursery would be created beside the grade II listed Wormbridge Court farm building.

A proposal to develop the same site was rejected by Herefordshire Council planners last May, for 12 listed reasons.

The latest application claims several of these reasons “had not been mentioned in nearly four years of discussion” with the council, and “had even been acknowledged as benefits of the scheme previously”.

Addressing these, the new application says that there is no prescribed cap on the expansion of Wormbridge and other villages targeted within the county for development, and the new proposal would benefit from, and add to, its existing facilities, while providing it with “a more cohesive settlement pattern and identity”.

It also claims to address previous concerns over noise, road layout and drainage.

Builder Bell Homes said in a letter with the application that it was still “very much in support of” the proposal, on which it had provided design advice.

Comments on the proposal, numbered 230357, can be made until March 22.